What began as a largely technical and limited universe of designers and users became one of the most important mediums of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. As the Pew Charitable Trust observed in 2004, it took 46 years to wire 30 percent of the United States for electricity; it took only 7 years for the Internet to reach that same level of connection to American homes. By 2005, 68 percent of American adults and 90 percent of American teenagers had used the Internet. Europe and Asia were at least as well connected as the United States. Nearly half of the citizens of the European Union are online, and even higher rates are found in the Scandinavian countries. There is a wide variance in Asian countries; for example, by 2005 Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan had at least half of their populations online, whereas India, Pakistan, and Vietnam had less than 10 percent. South Korea was the world leader in connecting its population to the Internet through high-speed broadband connections.

Such statistics can chart the Internet’s growth, but they offer few insights into the changes wrought as users—individuals, groups, corporations, and governments—have embedded the technology into everyday life. The Internet is now as much a lived experience as a tool for performing particular tasks, offering the possibility of creating an environment or virtual reality in which individuals might work, socially interact with others, and perhaps even live out their lives.

History, community, and communications

Two agendas

The Internet has evolved from the integration of two very different technological agendas—the Cold War networking of the U.S. military and the personal computer (PC) revolution. The first agenda can be dated to 1973, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sought to create a communications network that would support the transfer of large data files between government and government-sponsored academic-research laboratories. The result was the ARPANET, a robust decentralized network that supported a vast array of computer hardware. Initially, ARPANET was the preserve of academics and corporate researchers with access to time-sharing mainframe computer systems. Computers were large and expensive; most computer professionals could not imagine anyone needing, let alone owning, his own “personal” computer. And yet Joseph Licklider, one of the driving forces at DARPA for computer networking, stated that online communication would “change the nature and value of communication even more profoundly than did the printing press and the picture tube.”

The second agenda began to emerge in 1977 with the introduction of the Apple II, the first affordable computer for individuals and small businesses. Created by Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), the Apple II was popular in schools by 1979, but in the corporate market it was stigmatized as a game machine. The task of cracking the business market fell to IBM. In 1981 the IBM PC was released and immediately standardized the PC’s basic hardware and operating system—so much so that first PC-compatible and then simply PC came to mean any personal computer built along the lines of the IBM PC. A major centre of the PC revolution was the San Francisco Bay area, where several major research institutions funded by DARPA—Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Xerox PARC—provided much of the technical foundation for Silicon Valley. It was no small coincidence that Apple’s two young founders—Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak—worked as interns in the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the nearby Hewlett-Packard Company. The Bay Area’s counterculture also figured prominently in the PC’s history. Electronic hobbyists saw themselves in open revolt against the “priesthood” of the mainframe computer and worked together in computer-enthusiast groups to spread computing to the masses.

The WELL

Why does this matter? The military played an essential role in shaping the Internet’s architecture, but it was through the counterculture that many of the practices of contemporary online life emerged. A telling example is the early electronic bulletin board system (BBS), such as the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link). Established in 1985 by American publisher Stewart Brand, who viewed the BBS as an extension of his Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL was one of the first electronic communities organized around forums dedicated to particular subjects such as parenting and Grateful Dead concerts. The latter were an especially popular topic of online conversation, but it was in the parenting forum where a profound sense of community and belonging initially appeared. For example, when one participant’s child was diagnosed with leukemia, members of the forum went out of their way either to find health resources or to comfort the distressed parents. In this one instance, several features still prevalent in the online world can be seen. First, geography was irrelevant. WELL members in California and New York could bring their knowledge together within the confines of a forum—and could do so collectively, often exceeding the experience available to any local physician or medical centre. This marshaling of shared resources persists to this day as many individuals use the Internet to learn more about their ailments, find others who suffer from the same disease, and learn about drugs, physicians, and alternative therapies.

Another feature that distinguished the WELL forums was the use of moderators who could interrupt and focus discussion while also disciplining users who broke the rather loose rules. “Flame wars” (crass, offensive, or insulting exchanges) were possible, but anyone dissatisfied in one forum was free to organize another. In addition, the WELL was intensely democratic. WELL forums were the original chat rooms—online spaces where individuals possessing similar interests might congregate, converse, and even share their physical locations to facilitate meeting in person. Finally, the WELL served as a template for other online communities dedicated to subjects as diverse as Roman Catholicism, liberal politics, gardening, and automobile modification.

Instant broadcast communication

For the individual the Internet opened up new communication possibilities. E-mail has already led to a substantial decline in traditional “snail mail.” Instant messaging (IM), or text messaging, continues to expand, especially among youth, with the convergence of the Internet and cellular telephone access to the Web. Indeed, IM has become a particular problem in classrooms, where students often surreptitiously exchange notes via wireless communication devices. More than 50 million American adults, including 11 million at work, use IM.

From mailing lists to “buddy lists,” e-mail and IM have been used to create “smart mobs” that converge in the physical world. Examples include protest organizing, spontaneous performance art, and shopping. Obviously, people congregated before the Internet existed; the change wrought by mass e-mailings has been in the speed of assembling such events. For example, in February 1999 activists began planning protests against the November 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle, Washington. Using the Internet, organizers mobilized more than 50,000 individuals from around the world to engage in demonstrations—at times violent—that effectively altered the WTO’s agenda.

In the wake of catastrophic disasters, citizens have used the Internet to donate to charities in an unprecedented fashion. Others have used the Internet to reunite family members or to match lost pets with their owners. The role of the Internet in responding to disasters, both natural and deliberate, remains the topic of much discussion, as it is unclear whether the Internet actually can function in a disaster area when much of the infrastructure is destroyed. Certainly during the September 11, 2001, attacks, people found it easier to communicate with loved ones in New York City via e-mail than through the overwhelmed telephone network.

Social gaming

One-to-one or even one-to-many communication is only the most elementary form of Internet social life. The very nature of the Internet makes spatial distances largely irrelevant for social interactions. Online gaming has moved from simply playing a game with friends to a rather complex form of social life in which the game’s virtual reality spills over into the physical world. The case of EverQuest, a popular electronic game with several hundred thousand players, is one example. Property acquired in the game has been sold on the online auction site eBay, and characters with particular skill sets are also available for sale. What does it mean that one can own virtual property and that someone is willing to pay for this property with real money? Economists have begun studying such virtual economies, some of which now exceed the gross national product of countries in Africa and Asia. In fact, virtual economies finally have given economists a means of running controlled experiments.

Millions of people have created online game characters for entertainment purposes. Gaming creates an online community, but it also allows for a blurring of the boundaries between the real world and the virtual one. In Shanghai one gamer stabbed and killed another one in the real world over a virtual sword used in Legend of Mir 3. Although attempts were made to involve the authorities in the original dispute, the police found themselves at a loss prior to the murder because the law did not acknowledge the existence of virtual property. In South Korea violence surrounding online gaming happens often enough that police refer to such murders as “off-line PK,” a reference to player killing (PK), or player-versus-player lethal contests, which are allowed or encouraged in some games. By 2001 crime related to Lineage had forced South Korean police to create special cybercrime units to patrol both within the game and off-line. Potential problems from such games are not limited to crime. Virtual life can be addictive. Reports of players neglecting family, school, work, and even their health to the point of death have become more common.

Love and sex

By the start of the 21st century, approximately 20 percent of the Internet population had used it at some time to meet others, with Internet dating services collecting nearly half a billion dollars per year in matchmaking fees. Dating sites capture an important aspect of the Web economy—the ability to appeal to particular niche groups. Of the myriads of dating Web sites, many cater to individuals of particular ethnic or national identities and thereby preselect people along some well-defined axes of interest. Because of the low costs involved in setting up a Web site, the possibilities for “nichification” are nearly endless.

Pornography is another domain in which nichification is prevalent. By the 21st century, there were some four million Web sites devoted to pornography, containing more than a quarter of a billion pages—in other words, more than 10 percent of the Web. Forty million American adults regularly visit pornographic sites, which generate billions of dollars in yearly revenues. In response to this proliferation, a suggestion was made to place pornographic sites in a special “xxx” Web domain so that software could easily trace them and render them invisible to children. However, with no organization to ensure voluntary compliance, nothing came of the proposal. All of society’s vices, as well as its virtues, have manifested themselves on the Internet.

Advertising and e-commerce

Nichification allows for consumers to find what they want, but it also provides opportunities for advertisers to find consumers. For example, most search engines generate revenue by matching ads to an individual’s particular search query. Among the greatest challenges facing the Internet’s continued development is the task of reconciling advertising and commercial needs with the right of Internet users not to be bombarded by “pop-up” Web pages and spam (unsolicited e-mail).

Nichification also opens up important e-commerce opportunities. A bookstore can carry only so much inventory on its shelves, which thereby limits its collection to books with broad appeal. An online bookstore can “display” nearly everything ever published. Although traditional bookstores often have a special-order department, consumers have taken to searching and ordering from online stores from the convenience of their homes and offices.

Although books can be made into purely digital artifacts, “e-books” have not sold nearly as well as digital music. In part, this disparity is due to the need for an e-book reader to have a large, bright screen, which adds to the display’s cost and weight and leads to more-frequent battery replacement. Also, it is difficult to match the handy design and low cost of an old-fashioned paperback book. Interestingly, it turns out that listeners download from online music vendors as many obscure songs as big record company hits. Just a few people interested in some obscure song are enough to make it worthwhile for a vendor to store it electronically for sale over the Internet. What makes the Internet special here is not only its ability to match buyers and sellers quickly and relatively inexpensively but also that the Internet and the digital economy in general allow for a flowering of multiple tastes—in games, people, and music.

Information and copyright

Education

Commerce and industry are certainly arenas in which the Internet has had a profound effect, but what of the foundational institutions of any society—namely, those related to education and the production of knowledge? Here the Internet has had a variety of effects, some of which are quite disturbing. There are more computers in the classroom than ever before, but there is scant evidence that they enhance the learning of basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. And while access to vast amounts of digital information is convenient, it has also become apparent that most students now see libraries as antiquated institutions better used for their computer terminals than for their book collections. As teachers at all education levels can attest, students typically prefer to research their papers by reading online rather than wandering through a library’s stacks.

In a related effect the Internet has brought plagiarism into the computer era in two distinct senses. First, electronic texts have made it simple for students to “cut and paste” published sources (e.g., encyclopaedia articles) into their own papers. Second, although students could always get someone to write their papers for them, it is now much easier to find and purchase anonymous papers at Web sites and to even commission original term papers for a fixed fee. Ironically, what the Internet gives, it also takes away. Teachers now have access to databases of electronically submitted papers and can easily compare their own students’ papers against a vast archive of sources. Even a simple online search can sometimes find where one particularly well-turned phrase originally appeared.

File sharing

College students have been at the leading edge of the growing awareness of the centrality of intellectual property in a digital age. When American college student Shawn Fanning invented Napster in 1999, he set in motion an ongoing legal battle over digital rights. Napster was a file-sharing system that allowed users to share electronic copies of music online. The problem was obvious: recording companies were losing revenues as one legal copy of a song was shared among many people. Although the record companies succeeded in shutting down Napster, they found themselves having to contend with a new form of file sharing, P2P (“person-to-person”). In P2P there is no central administrator to shut down as there had been with Napster. Initially, the recording industry sued the makers of P2P software and a few of the most prolific users—often students located on university campuses with access to high-speed connections for serving music and, later, movie files—in an attempt to discourage the millions of people who regularly used the software. Still, even while some P2P software makers have been held liable for losses that the copyright owners have incurred, more-devious schemes for circumventing apprehension have been invented.

The inability to prevent file sharing has led the recording and movie industries to devise sophisticated copy protection on their CDs and DVDs. In a particularly controversial incident, Sony Corporation introduced CDs into the market in 2005 with copy protection that involved a special viruslike code that hid on a user’s computer. This code, however, also was open to being exploited by virus writers to gain control of users’ machines.

Electronic publishing

The Internet has become an invaluable and discipline-transforming environment for scientists and scholars. In 2004 Google began digitizing public-domain and out-of-print materials from several cooperating libraries in North America and Europe, such as the University of Michigan library, which made some seven million volumes available. Although some authors and publishers challenged the project for fear of losing control of copyrighted material, similar digitization projects were launched by Microsoft Corporation and the online book vendor Amazon.com, although the latter company proposed that each electronic page would be retrieved for a small fee shared with the copyright holders.

The majority of academic journals are now online and searchable. This has created a revolution in scholarly publishing, especially in the sciences and engineering. For example, arXiv.org has transformed the rate at which scientists publish and react to new theories and experimental data. Begun in 1991, arXiv.org is an online archive in which physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and computational biologists upload research papers long before they will appear in a print journal. The articles are then open to the scrutiny of the entire scientific community, rather than to one or two referees selected by a journal editor. In this way scientists around the world can receive an abstract of a paper as soon as it has been uploaded into the depository. If the abstract piques a reader’s interest, the entire paper can be downloaded for study. Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the U.S. National Science Foundation support arXiv.org as an international resource.

While arXiv.org deals with articles that might ultimately appear in print, it is also part of a larger shift in the nature of scientific publishing. In the print world a handful of companies control the publication of the most scientific journals, and the price of institutional subscriptions is frequently exorbitant. This has led to a growing movement to create online-only journals that are accessible for free to the entire public—a public that often supports the original research with its taxes. For example, the Public Library of Science publishes online journals of biology and medicine that compete with traditional print journals. There is no difference in how their articles are vetted for publication; the difference is that the material is made available for free. Unlike other creators of content, academics are not paid for what they publish in scholarly journals, nor are those who review the articles. Journal publishers, on the other hand, have long received subsidies from the scientific community, even while charging that community high prices for its own work. Although some commercial journals have reputations that can advance the careers of those who publish in them, the U.S. government has taken the side of the “open source” publishers and demanded that government-financed research be made available to taxpayers as soon as it has been published.

In addition to serving as a medium for the exchange of articles, the Internet can facilitate the discussion of scientific work long before it appears in print. Scientific blogs—online journals kept by individuals or groups of researchers—have flourished as a form of online salon for the discussion of ongoing research. There are pitfalls to such practices, though. Astronomers who in 2005 posted abstracts detailing the discovery of a potential 10th planet found that other researchers had used their abstracts to find the new astronomical body themselves. In order to claim priority of discovery, the original group rushed to hold a news conference rather than waiting to announce their work at an academic conference or in a peer-reviewed journal.

Politics and culture

Free speech

The Internet has broadened political participation by ordinary citizens, especially through the phenomenon of blogs. Many blogs are simply online diaries or journals, but others have become sources of information and opinion that challenge official government pronouncements or the mainstream news media. By 2005 there were approximately 15 million blogs, a number that was doubling roughly every six months. The United States dominates the blog universe, or “blogosphere,” with English as the lingua franca, but blogs in other languages are proliferating. In one striking development, the Iranian national language, Farsi, has become the commonest Middle Eastern language in the blogosphere. Despite the Iranian government’s attempts to limit access to the Internet, some 60,000 active Farsi blogs are hosted at a single service provider, PersianBlog.

The Internet poses a particular problem for autocratic regimes that restrict access to independent sources of information. The Chinese government has been particularly successful at policing the public’s access to the Internet, beginning with its “Great Firewall of China” that automatically blocks access to undesirable Web sites. The state also actively monitors Chinese Web sites to ensure that they adhere to government limits on acceptable discourse and tolerable dissent. In 2000 the Chinese government banned nine types of information, including postings that might “harm the dignity and interests of the state” or “disturb social order.” Users must enter their national identification number in order to access the Internet at cybercafés. Also, Internet service providers are responsible for the content on their servers. Hence, providers engage in a significant amount of self-censorship in order to avoid problems with the law, which may result in losing access to the Internet or even serving jail time. Finally, the authorities are willing to shut Web sites quickly and with no discussion. Of course, the state’s efforts are not completely effective. Information can be smuggled into China on DVDs, and creative Chinese users can circumvent the national firewall with proxy servers—Web sites that allow users to move through the firewall to an ostensibly acceptable Web site where they can connect to the rest of the Internet.

Others have taken advantage of the Internet’s openness to spread a variety of political messages. The Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004 had a significant Internet component. More troubling is the use of the Internet by terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda to recruit members, pass along instructions to sleeper cells, and celebrate their own horrific activities. In The Iraq the Second Persian Gulf War was fought not only on the ground but also online as al-Qaeda operatives used specific Web sites to call their followers to jihad. Al-Qaeda used password-protected chat rooms as key recruitment centres, as well as Web sites to test potential recruits before granting them access to the group’s actual network. On the other hand, posting material online is also a potential vulnerability. Gaining access to the group’s “Jihad Encyclopaedia” has enabled security analysts to learn about potential tactics, and Arabic-speaking investigators have learned to infiltrate chat rooms and gain access to otherwise hidden materials.

Political campaigns and muckraking

During the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, blogs became a locus for often heated exchanges about the candidates. In fact, the candidates themselves used blogs and Web sites for fund-raising and networking. One of the first innovators was Howard Dean, an early front-runner in the Democratic primaries, whose campaign used a Web site for fund-raising and organizing local meetings. In particular, Dean demonstrated that a modern presidential campaign could use the Internet to galvanize volunteer campaign workers and to raise significant sums from many small donations. In a particularly astute move, Dean’s campaign set up a blog for comments from his supporters, and it generated immediate feedback on certain proposals such as refusing to accept public campaign funding. Both the George W. Bush and the John Kerry presidential campaigns, as well as the Democratic and Republican parties, came to copy the practices pioneered by Dean and his advisers. In addition, changes in U.S. campaign finance laws allowed for the creation of “527s,” independent action groups such as Moveon.org that used the Internet to raise funds and rally support for particular issues and candidates.

By 2005 it was widely agreed that politicians would have to deal not only with the mainstream media (i.e., newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) but also with a new phenomenon—the blogosphere. Although blogs do not have editors or fact checkers, they have benefited from scandals in the mainstream media, which have made many readers more skeptical of all sources of information. Also, bloggers have forced mainstream media to confront topics they might otherwise ignore. Some pundits have gone so far as to predict that blogs and online news sources will replace the mainstream media, but it is far more likely that these diverse sources of information will complement each other. Indeed, falling subscription rates have led many newspaper publishers to branch into electronic editions and to incorporate editorial blogs and forums for reader feedback; thus, some of the distinctions between the media have already been blurred.